Love Made Public

In the years following Keats’s death, Fanny Brawne devoted herself to new study, learning Italian, and translating short stories from German. She published a number of these stories in magazines. After several years of correspondence, during which they grew quite close, Keats’s younger sister Fanny came to live with the Brawnes.

While staying in Boulogne in 1833, Fanny Brawne met Louis Lindon, a merchant’s son. They married on June 15. While Brawne told him something of her relationship with Keats, she admitted that he had “a very imperfect idea of the real case.” (Richardson, Fanny Brawne, 127). The couple settled in Germany and had three children.

Fanny Brawne Lindon died in 1865, in relative obscurity; her relationship with Keats was fully revealed in 1878, when her children worked with bibliographer and historian Harry Buxton Forman to publish Keats’s letters to her. Surprisingly, Victorian readers were horrified. A review in Scribner’s believed that “Keats’s mistake was fatal with regard to this woman, and his approaching death a merciful release.” Sir Charles Dilke, son of the Dilkes known to Keats and Brawne, wrote in The Athenaeum that the publication “is the greatest impeachment of a woman’s sense of womanly delicacy to be found in the history of literature…what are we to say if this hideous breach of the sanctities of life is done with the implied warrantry of the woman to whom the letters were addressed? – of her who should, indeed, have….burnt them or ordered them buried with her” (Richardson, 143). Without Brawne’s own correspondence to Keats to present her side of the relationship, readers perceived her as faithless, flirtatious, and shallow. This negative view of Brawne persisted until the publication of her correspondence with Keats’s sister Fanny in 1937.